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Cyril Wong
Cyril Wong (黄益民; Huáng Yì Mín; born 27 June 1977) is a poet, fictionist and critic.[https://www.poetry.sg/browse/cyril-wong/biography poetry.sg]. Retrieved 31 July 2016. Biography Born in 1977, Cyril Wong attended Saint Patrick's School, Singapore and Temasek Junior College, before completing a doctoral degree in English literature at the National University of Singapore. His poems have appeared in journals around the world, including Atlanta Review, Fulcrum, Poetry International, Cimarron Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry New Zealand, MĀNOA, Ambit, Dimsum, Asia Literary Review, The Bungeishichoo (Japanesnal, SOFTBLOW, and a featured poet at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the Sydney Writers' Festival, and the Singapore Writers' Festival. ''TIME'' magazine (10 December 2007) has written that "his work expands beyond simple sexuality...to embrace themes of love, alienation and human relationships of all kinds."TIME Magazine (Asia Edition). Retrieved 31 July 2016. Along with Yong Shu Hoong, he is one of only two poets writing in English to have twice won the Singapore Literature Prize.Asia Today. Retrieved 31 July 2016. Cyril's poetry Cyril has been recognised as Singapore's first truly confessional poet, mainly "on the basis of the brutally candid sexuality in his poetry, along with a barely submerged anxiety over the fragility of human connection and a relentless self-querying; but the label understates Wong's constant evolution".Toh Hsien Min. "Wong, Cyril (1977– )." The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English. Ed. Jeremy Noel-Tod and Ian Hamilton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 662. By turns "acerbic and tender, ironic and meditative",Cheong, Felix. "Out in the City." The Edge, Singapore. 28 July 2003. 45. the poet "has many styles, all of them limber, which combine the anecdotal and the confessional with the intuitive and the empathetic."Patke, Rajeev S. and Philip Holden. "Contemporary poetry 1990–2008: Singapore." The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010. 185. His poems are known for their "lyrical intensity" and for "training an almost anthropologically curious eye on the laws and customs of his own family: their strange taciturn ways, their gnomic references to disappointment and guilt, and their penchant for self-delusion."Holden, Philip, Angelia Poon and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, eds. "Section 2 (1965–1990): Introduction." Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature. Singapore: NUS Press/National Arts Council, 2009. 370–371. In a way that makes him especially distinctive within the Singaporean poetry scene, his work possesses "a heightened awareness of the physical body, and a desire to probe its visceral materiality for emotional truths."Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature. Singapore: NUS Press/NAC, 2009. 370–371. Ng Yi-Sheng describes that throughout the poet's career, "he has unashamedly presented himself in public as a gay man, winning himself a large LGBT fan base that identifies intimately with his writings on love, depression and antipathy towards his family." Edwin Thumboo has praised Cyril's poems for their "remarkable inwardness" and how, "without exception, they leave us with the feeling of subjects – occasion, non-happening, an especially poignant experience – explored to unusual limits."Thumboo, Edwin. "Introduction" IN Cyril Wong's Squatting Quietly. Singapore: Firstfruits, 2000. 9. As regards Cyril's third collection, below: absence, and its play of presence and absence in the context of Singapore's urbanity and cultural memory, John Phillips described the poetry as offering "an affirmation of emptiness in a time and place where this is barely possible."Phillips, John. "The Future of the Past: Archiving Singapore." Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. Ed. Mark Crinson. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 160. Although Cyril has also been popularly known as a gay poet,TIME Magazine (Asia Edition). Retrieved 31 July 2016. Singaporean critic Gwee Li Sui has stressed that readers need not perceive the poet's persona in terms of gay exceptionality: "his qualities of spaciousness and morphing images also manifesting an interest in a kind of New-Age irreligious spirituality."Gwee Li Sui. "The New Poetry of Singapore." Sharing Borders: Studies in Contemporary Singaporean-Malaysian Literature II. Ed. Gwee Li Sui. Singapore: NLB/NAC 2009. 250. This interest is fully expressed in Cyril's book, Satori Blues, in which the author "teases us out of our complacencies and directs/guides our thinking along the long, hard route to self-awareness...Hence 'blues'. Hence the extraordinary attempt to seduce the reader into somnambulance-via-rhythmic, rhymic language, the language of meditative poetry."Singh, Kirpal. "Poetic Meditations: Two Singaporean Poets and a Personal Reflection." Kunapipi. Vol. XXXII No. 1-2 Dec 2010. 109–110. In closer connection to the poet's Confessionalism, Andrew Howdle writes of the poems in The Lover's Inventory as having "a sense of musical persona, a manner of singing, of intonation and expression, and are fully aware of how they confess through masks and make others reveal the masks that they wear."Singapore Poetry. Retrieved 17 Nov. 2016. In a review by the Southeast Asian Review of English, Cyril's work has been described as "an art that works simply from a personal plane, and from within such a plane we have some of the most sensitive, articulate probings into the nature of one's self that have never been seen before in all of contemporary Singaporean verse."Jeyam, Leonard. "The Poetry of Personal Revelation: Reviewing Cyril Wong's Unmarked Treasure." SARE. No. 47 Apr. 2006/07. 99. Gwee Li Sui has suggested that political and non-political verse are "paradoxically saying the same thing in Singapore", their forms "too often conflated in poetic argument with their creator's bodiliness"; and as regards the supposedly "non-political" and inward nature of Cyril's verse, the poet has "landscapes that replicate so tightly his corporeal condition that his own poems become not just the means but also the ends of his self-transference. Wong regularly brings into his writing the empty space on each page in some performance of being more than words, embracing the word-space dichotomy as a version of a mind-body one... His poetry ends up filling books in a way that destroys their form to give shape to heightened interiority.""The Body of Poetry Broken For You." Whatever Happened to Politics in Singapore's English-Language Poetry? Ed. Michael Schindhelm and Damian Christinger. Hong Kong and Zurich: Connecting Spaces and Zurich University of the Arts, 2017. 73. Other poets who have responded to his work include Timothy Liu, who has called Cyril's "transpacific sensibility a fine refreshment";Liu, Timothy. "Praise for previous collections" IN Cyril Wong's like a seed with its singular purpose. Firstfruits, 2006. 7. Lewis Warsh, with his description of Cyril's poems as "evocative and sensual" and "untainted by bitterness";Warsh, Lewis. "Praise for previous collections" IN Cyril Wong's like a seed with its singular purpose. Firstfruits, 2006. 6. Margot Schilpp, who has remarked that his work shows "how great the divide between expectations and outcomes can be";Schilpp, Margot. "Praise for previous collections" IN Cyril Wong's like a seed with its singular purpose. Firstfruits, 2006. 6. and Robert Yeo, who has commented on the framing devices in his work that "deliberately blur distinctions between the real (Cyril Wong) and the persona (the poet who 'wonders at his own existence'). The result is a distancing that layers the poems and renders them more fraught and complex and encourages, indeed demands, repeated reading."Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. Retrieved 31 Jul. 2016. Books * The Lover's Inventory (Math Paper Press, 2015) * Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories (Epigram Books, 2014) * After You (Math Paper Press, 2013) * The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza (Epigram Books, 2013) * The Dictator's Eyebrow (Ethos Books, 2013) * Straw, Sticks, Brick (Math Paper Press, 2012) * Satori Blues (Softblow Press, 2011) * oneiros (Firstfruits, 2010) * Let me tell you something about that night (Transit Lounge, 2009 | Ethos Books, 2012) * tilting our plates to catch the light (Firstfruits, 2007 | Math Paper Press, 2012) * Excess Baggage and Claim, co-authored with Terry Jaensch (Transit Lounge, 2007) * like a seed with its singular purpose (Firstfruits, 2006) * unmarked treasure (Firstfruits, 2004 | Math Paper Press, 2012) * below: absence (Firstfruits, 2002 | Math Paper Press, 2017) * the end of his orbit (Firstfruits, 2001 | Math Paper Press, 2017) * squatting quietly (Firstfruits, 2000) eBook * Fires (Book Merah, 2009) ASIN: B002P8MPK8, Kindle Edition Chapbooks * You Cannot Count Smoke (Math Paper Press, 2011) * The Boy With The Flower That Grew Out Of His Ass (Math Paper Press, 2007 and 2015) Anthologies (as editor) * We Contain Multitudes: Twelve Years of SOFTBLOW (Epigram Books, 2016) * Here and Beyond: 12 Stories (Ethos Books, 2014) * Rainbow Voices: An Anthology of Creative Writings (The Arts House/Singapore Association for Mental Health, 2014) Transcreation * Me Migrant (Poems by Md Mukul Hossine, tr. from Bengali, Ethos Books, 2016) Awards and acclaim * Singapore Literature Prize for The Lover's Inventory (2016)TODAY. Retrieved 15 July 2016. * Finalist of Singapore Book Publishers Association's Singapore Book Awards for The Dictator's Eyebrow (2016)The Straits Times. Retrieved 31 March 2016. * Let me tell you something about that night listed by The Straits Times as among the best 5 books of the year (2009) * tilting our plates to catch the light listed by The Straits Times as among the best 5 books of the year (2007) * Singapore Literature Prize for unmarked treasure (2006) * National Arts Council's Young Artist Award (Singapore, 2005) * Golden Point Award (Singapore, 2004) References External links * "Hold Them With a Smile", Singapore Poetry * "Into The Abyss We Go", Quarterly Literary Review Singapore * "[http://www.asiancha.com/content/view/1778/453/ Englishes: Ann Ang's Bang My Car and Cyril Wong's Straw, Sticks, Brick]", Cha: An Asian Literary Journal * "[http://mascarareview.com/christopher-phelps-reviews-satori-blues-by-cyril-wong/ Symmetry Breaking in Satori Blues]", Mascara Literary Review * "[http://www.asiancha.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=718&Itemid=259 In dreams: Cyril Wong's Oneiros]", Cha: An Asian Literary Journal * "[http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2007/1979485.htm Excess Baggage and Claim (Review)]", ABC Radio National * [https://poetry.sg/browse/cyril-wong/biography poetry.sg] * Postcolonial Web: Singaporean Literature * Audio recordings at The Cortland Review * More poems in The Drunken Boat * Cordite * Jazz Cigarette * Poems and prose in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore * A long poem in Criticine * Reading an excerpt from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f4k7Kj29bA Satori Blues] * Cyril Wong on Singaporean Literature, [https://www.arkint.org/read-international-cyril-wong The Arkansas International] * Video-poem by Dream Bravely Category:LGBT articles